Doctor Who_ Set Piece - Doctor Who_ Set Piece Part 15
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Doctor Who_ Set Piece Part 15

But it wasn't pain. It was anger.

Kadiatu sat bolt upright in her bed.

What was that?

The book teetered, just held by his fingertips. He muttered something in his sleep about tea. about tea.

He woke up with a start.

There was an Ant not a foot away from him.

He dropped Les Miserables Les Miserables.

Its antennae reached for him almost faster than he could react, jolting backwards with such force that he knocked the chaise longue over. He landed hard on the floor, rolling away from the machine.

94.There was a terrible buzzing in his skull, like a kitchen timer gone insane.

The Ant was climbing over the chaise longue to get to him. Soft buzzing. Its attachments whirred like blender blades.

Someone was pouring warm honey into his head.

He scrabbled limply backwards across the floor, but his arms and legs were melting, melting into the sweet heat. The droning dragged at his feet and hands. Keep going, get away! He tried to fight, but there was nothing to fight, only the slow unknotting of his muscles, the sleepiness gnawing at his eyes.

There was a paraffin lamp burning low on the writing desk. He grabbed with hands as heavy as treacle.

Somehow he swung the lamp as the Ant lunged at him. Glass smashed across the hungry metal face. There was a flash of flame and a puff of kerosene smell. The robot reared up, struck at him with metal legs, knocking him gently against the grandfather clock.

When it came down it brushed its antennae across his face, softly.

His whole body turned into honey and melted down the wall.

The Ant loomed over him for a moment, its antennae twitching. The metal sensors traced patterns on his face, stroking his mind. It didn't hurt, it was gentle, it didn't hurt it was so soft, tick buzzing, working its way into him gently, tock, it didn't hurt, alarm clock, tick, ringing, buzzing, tock. Get up!

TICK. Get up! TOCK. Time to, TICK, get up! TOCK. Get up.

95.

Chapter 8.

Mandelbrot Set Piece

The great god Ra whose shrine once covered acres Is filler now for crossword-puzzle makers.

(Keith Preston) 'You ever heard of the butterfly effect?' said Ace.

She and Sesehaten were watching two priests bathe in a small fountain, ritually washing their bodies. They stepped out of the water, and the other Setites handed them clean linen.

Ace had been formally introduced to the group. They were serious men with serious eyes, their mouths set in hard conspiratorial lines. Ex-priests, now clerks petty officials who had come a long way down in the world. The fountain was behind Senef's house, and behind the fountain was a cave, a vertical slit in the cliff. 'What's in there, Sesehaten?'

'My name,' said the scribe, 'is Sesehset.'

'You had to change your name when Pharaoh brought in the new religion, right?'

Sesehset blew out a long sigh, disturbing the motes of dust swirling in the dawn air. 'He changed his name, and everyone followed suit. He was born Amenhotep, in honour of Amun, the first of gods. I suppose in some ways we should be grateful. Our temples and estates were confiscated, our priests put out of work and the care, the feeding of Set left undone. But Amun's temples ' He shook his head. 'Akhenaten's men swarmed over the land like wasps. Everywhere they found Amun's name, they hacked it out with a chisel.

Even in Akhenaten's own father's name. Temples, tombs, royal inscriptions, it made no difference.'

'I've heard the gossip in the tavern,' said Ace. 'Pharaoh won't let anyone else worship the way they want to. Everybody's got to worship his god.' The priests had disappeared inside the cave. 'What's in there?' said Ace again.

'Set.'

'What?'

'His image. The statue from his temple. Each day we bathe and feed it, just as we did when it was in the inner shrine. We saved it from Akhenaten, and when the tyrant is overthrown, we will reinstate it.'

'The Setcave,' Ace laughed. 'Right.'

97.'The real Set is hidden somewhere else.'

'Is that right?'

'He's waiting. The gods shackled him after he and Horus fought. But he'll be back, back from the west, the land of the dead.' Sesehset leaned closer.

'That's what the doorways in the air are for,' he murmured. 'One day, Set's going to walk through one of them. Maybe sooner, maybe later.'

'Listen, if he's the god of evil, how come you were allowed to have temples and stuff?'

'He's not evil. He's thunder in the desert. He's a hippo trampling the papyrus crop. He's dancing and sex and,' he raised his bowl in a toast, 'good wine.'

He waved the wine about, indicating all of Egypt. 'They call disorder evil.

They turn us all into numbers, numbers on the scrolls here. This whole country runs on records and numbers and records and clerks, measuring everything and scribbling everything down.'

'Like we were pieces in a machine,' said Ace.

Sesehset was in full flight, not listening to her. 'He can't be measured by anyone, written down by anyone. He has his place had his place, before the madman came. "I am Set",' he recited, '"strongest of the gods, and I slay Ra's enemy every day, standing at the front of the ship of millions of years and no other god can do that." The universe wouldn't work without him. He is chaos. He is the storm.'

Ace nodded coolly. 'A butterfly flaps its wings, making a tiny change in the air. That change gets magnified, right? A breeze turns into a gust, a gust turns into a wind. The wind turns into a hurricane. All because of the butterfly.'

Sesehset laughed out loud. 'That's superb! A hurricane caused by an insect.'

'Every storm starts with something small.'

Sesehset reached out and touched her on the nose. 'Set sends the butterfly to start the storm.'

One of Sesehset's servants brought them more wine, and they sat in the shade of a palm tree, slowly drinking the strong stuff. Sesehset said, 'We had about five years. Then Akhenaten picked up the court and moved it to this blasted desert plain. They hadn't even finished building the palace he lived in a tent for a year.'

The ex-priest plucked a bit of grape stem out of his teeth. 'No Net, no Isis, no Khepri, no Khnum. No stories, no pictures, no moral teachings, no priests or rituals. Just Akhenaten and his silent, faceless Aten. He just stands around in the sun all day, throwing flowers at it. His brain's probably boiled by now.'

'He's not crazy,' said Ace. 'Or if he is, he's crazy like a fox. What he is is a tyrant. That's why there are soldiers everywhere, right? No-one likes what he's doing.'

98.Sesehset snorted. 'And meanwhile, foreign princes are taking our lands, and there's plague devouring the Levant. One thing you could say for old Amun, he looked after the wars. Akhenaten's father used to stuff Amun's temples with booty. But now Pharaoh lives in a dream, talking to his Aten, his eyes closed to the real world.'

'You've gotta fight back,' said Ace. 'You can't let him do this, he's wrecking everything.'

'Now I think you you have been standing in the sun for too long,' said Sesehset. have been standing in the sun for too long,' said Sesehset.

Ace shook her head. 'Let this go on and you'll have a civil war on your hands. Religion's one of the best excuses for war, right? Belfast, the Draconian jihads. It'll be Egyptian soldiers killing Egyptian people. Our people. Unless we do something about it.'

'You know,' said the priest, 'you're not like any woman I've ever known.'

'You propose to me, and I'll gut you.'

Sesehset shouted with laughter, pouring them both a fourth bowl of wine or was it a fifth? 'Copper will be beaten into swords, bread will be bought with blood,' he recited, his voice growing more serious. 'We will laugh like the sick, we will not weep at death. Our hearts shall beat for ourselves alone.

We'll sit with our backs turned when someone kills another. The land dies, no matter how many laws you make to stop it.'

The priests had returned from the secret cave, carrying a platter of food, bowls and cloths. Their daily duty was done.

'If we move against Pharaoh,' Sesehset said, 'we could be starting that civil war.'

(a) The drawing room was on fire, and (b) there was an Ant in the corner, which was (c) doing something to the Doctor. Therefore (d) Kadiatu, who had come bolting in clutching a weapon, yelled (e) 'Oh shit!'

The Ant didn't appear to notice her sudden entry. Its front pair of legs were pressed against the Time Lord's chest. He lay against the floor and wall at a peculiar angle, ragdoll-limp. The Ant's face was dipped to his, three of its antennae fixed to his forehead and cheek in a delicate steel kiss.

His eyes were open, his enraged blue gaze reflected in the robot's metal face. One of his hands spasmed, again and again.

Kadiatu had raised her gun, taken a bead on the Ant. Now her conscious mind kicked in and told her she was holding a percussion rifle that would blow a three-metre hole in the wall. The shrapnel would've shredded the Doctor, and probably her too, at this range.

There was an industrial laser taped to the top of the rifle. She slapped a hand over it, sliced down delicately. The red point burned a black graffito down the wall and bit into the back of the Ant's neck.

99.It reared up, squealing no, the sound was its antennae, whirring and twitching wildly as they detached from the Doctor's face. Its head hung at an odd angle. The little man raised a hand between him and the monster, rolling limply to one side.

Kadiatu fired the laser a second time, the red beam cutting through greasy smoke, slicing through one of the Ant's legs. It wobbled, trying to turn its head to find the source of the attack. She fired a third time, and the Ant's head rolled onto the wooden floor with a dull clang.

The body collapsed. For a moment Kadiatu thought it had fallen onto him.

But the little man was clear of the metal corpse, trembling in the corner, one hand pressed to his temple where an antenna had drawn blood.

Kadiatu gripped her gun in one hand as she beat out the flames with a rug, urgently. 'Christ, you idiot!' she snarled, 'you might've burned the house down!' He didn't say anything.

She thumped out the last of the fire, still clutching the gun in one hand.

'Why didn't you cry out?' she yelled, striding towards him.

In a single, fluid movement, he pulled his whole body into foetal position, arms thrown over his head.

Kadiatu stopped where she was. 'Christ,' she said again.

Most of the scars, it appeared, were on the inside.

Ace sat in the main hall of Sedjet's house, alone.

Despite Sesehset's words, the Setites were local boys, without much of an idea about history. For them, the world just started with the gods' war and then kept going indefinitely. Egypt's fortunes might wax and wane over the centuries, but the country hadn't changed in any major way for thousands of years.

But for Ace, who'd ridden the back of time, history was more like a series of circles. Empires rose and fell, old religions died and new ones took their place, elections and coups and wars and fashions flowed like the tide. To the Egyptians, Akhenaten's changes were shattering. To her, he was just another fascist.

Ace drank black beer from a bowl, slowly, wishing for a vodka and Coke.

She was drinking a lot. Maybe she was drinking too much. It was something to do instead of making up her mind.

Her own home time in the late eighties had seemed like a little pocket of eternity, as though it had always been two minutes past the Industrial Revolution and The Farm had always been the best band out. But turn the page, and you had the Berlin Wall coming down, and the Gulf War, and Nirvana.

Ace closed her eyes, but she couldn't stop the tumbling imagery in her head.

Was this the way the Doctor had seen time? Not a straight line, obviously, but 100 a circle, or a spiral, or a hopelessly tangled web.

Or a Mandelbrot set with his name on it. The storm of time that had blown her out of her bedroom and onto Iceworld had been coloured like an insane fractal, the hurricane whipping her faster and faster past every star in the galaxy, accelerating through two million years of patterns, and the patterns got more complicated as you looked more closely, histories inside histories, events inside events. Her head was spinning and it wasn't the beer.

The more you interfere, the more you have to interfere. The treadmill that had kept the Doctor coming back to Earth.

A lump had lodged itself in her throat, but it refused to resolve itself into tears. Why aren't you here with me, so I can do my companion bit, ask you questions, watch your back, be part of the plan? God, why am I so dependent on you? Why aren't you here to help me? Why am I alone?

Once she had dreamed about Jan, in a crazy morphic dreamspace on Belial, her mind and body flowing like wax into Benny and the Doctor. Liquid inti-macy, closer than she had ever been with her Traveller man. 'Love is forever,'

he was saying in the dream. 'Did you forget?'

'Then maybe I didn't love you!' she screamed. 'I don't love you! I never loved you!'

And now she was screaming into the dusty air, 'You died! You died! What's the point of love if we're gonna die? If it isn't forever it isn't love! If it isn't forever it isn't real! It doesn't count! It doesn't matter!'

She stumbled out of the room, shrieking, and ran a few paces into the desert sand and threw up.

She lay down on the ground, her chest heaving.

Something had untied itself inside her, something heavy was gone from her stomach. Her father was dead. Jan was dead. The Doctor was dead.

Something broken loose inside her skull kept chanting it, over and over it's over, it's over, it's over, it's over.

Listen to me, Sesehset had said. Sesehset had said. You're a separate person. Are you the eye You're a separate person. Are you the eye of your friend? Are you his hand? He's dead, but you are still alive. And not of your friend? Are you his hand? He's dead, but you are still alive. And not everyone shapes themselves into a box. everyone shapes themselves into a box.